The Best Super Bowl Ads on Wheels

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

The beer commercials were flat and most dot-com ads except Groupon kept intact their string of cluelessness. So Super Bowl 45 (XLV to traditionalists) was rescued by the slew of car ads. VW, Chrysler, and parts of GM got the most out of their investments. Among Germany’s Big Three luxury makers, Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz ran 1-2-3 in a race to convince the public at large which unaffordable super-luxury brand you should most look up to. Chevrolet had one of the worst ads (Chevy Cruze) that was even less understandable (and thus less embarrassing) if you watched the big game in a noisy room. Here are the best and some other notable outliers.

Volkswagen Passat – The Force
A boy dressed as Darth Vader tries and fails to work his powers on household objects and the family dog. Finally, to his surprise, he gets Dad’s VW Passat in the driveway to start up – when Dad looking out the kitchen window presses the remote start button. The ad (link at story top) was human and likeable and there was a chance you remembered the car in the ad was a Volkswagen. Most post-game ratings had this at or near the top, too. VW has done a good job injecting a sense of fun-to-drive into its ads, what VW used to call Fahrvergneugen..Audi – Release the Hounds

Two inmates in a prison for the wealthy break out to the cobblestoned parking lot. The one who climbs in the back seat of a chauffeured Mercedes-Benz (“Lancaster, no! It’s a trap.” “Nonsense, my father owned one”) is driven back to prisoner reception while the one who hops in the driver seat of an Audi A8 escapes. The ad works because of the eternal perception that Mercedes is old luxury (psst, friends of Lancaster’s father probably felt that way in the sixties) even if in reality Audi, Mercedes, and BMW are so close on technology, refinement, and handling.
Audi, seeing itself as the brash newcomer that wants to lead the world in luxury car sales this decade, has done a good job in a string of Luxury Revisited ads of casting Mercedes as the car of the stuffy and idle rich while ignoring BMW, the company that actually is the luxury sales leader. (On a global basis, Lexus is behind the Germans.) Give Audi credit for flashes of humor within the commercial. When nothing else stops the jailbreakers including the “release the hounds” order (fluffy white showdogs give leisurely chase), the head of security from his compound says, “Hit ’em with the Kenny G”; Lancaster (Steve Martin) stops in his tracks as he hears “Songbird” and moans appreciatively, “Oh, I love this song.”Chrysler – (Eminem) Imported from Detroit

At 2:03 when most Super Bowl ads ran 30 seconds, this was an effective mini-TV drama featuring Eminem. The ad talks about the spirit of a once-down-now-rebuilding Detroit – some visuals are bleak, others uplifting – and the cars coming out of the ashes, including the new Chrysler 200 featured in the ad. Two minutes gives Chrysler time to punch out at Motown detractors and say too many stories “are written by folks who’ve never been here and don’t know what we’re capable of … [and] when it comes to luxury, it’s as much about where it’s from as who it’s for. Now we’re from America but this isn’t New York City or the Windy City or Sin City.” You can never go wrong bashing the Big Apple.
At least this wasn’t as embarrassingly jingoistic as last summer’s ad showing George Washington leading an attack against the British in a column of Dodge Challengers with the voiceover, “Here are a couple of things America got right: cars and freedom.” Never mind that America got it right with help from the French back then and Chrysler got it right with a bailout from the government (1980s), the Germans (Daimler, 1990s), and now the Italians (Fiat). Regardless: This helps define the current Chrysler brand positively and makes potential buyers think about one promising new model.Chevrolet Silverado HD – Tommy

In a throwback to Lassie and “What is it, girl? Timmy fell in the well? We’ve got to rescue her!” the Chevy Silverado owner uses his pickup to rescue Tommy from a well, a cave, a hot air balloon, and the belly of a whale. There’s a nice final line as dad drives off to the rescue one last time: “I didn’t even know this town had a volcano.” The ad has humor and it mentions the Silverado a zillion times, something Kia’s Optima ad (see below) sort of forgot.BMW Advanced Diesel – Changes

The Germans believe diesel-engine cars play a key role in alternative fuels technology (just wait till we see diesel hybrids, they say). BMW deserves credit for fanning the embers with Changes, a 30-second spot set to David Bowie lyrics, that opens with images of horribly sooty trucks and passenger cars then morphs to a shot of a new BMW 335d in a four-wheel drift blowing past an aging ’80s-era Mercedes diesel sedan. See, it isn’t just Audi that’s using Mercedes as a foil.
BMW’s primary ad of the Super Bowl was a designed-in-America, manufactured-in-America-focused ad for the BMW X3 SUV that made the Greenville, SC, Chamber of Commerce proud. It lacked the emotional appeal of the Chrysler-Eminem ad. And it was too polite to crow that the future of U.S. vehicle manufacturing may be shifting from the rust belt to the new South. BMW had its heart in the diesel ad.
The Mercedes-Benz Welcome ad, in which hundreds of driverless cars return to stage a homecoming celebrating 125 years of history for the inventor of the automobile, was nicely crafted but it was weak on an emotional link if you don’t already own (or covet) the brand, and it re-used the same visual theme – lots of Benzes cruising the streets in unison – as the company’s annual December Winter Sales Event TV ads.NOT EVERY AD DID WELL
No car ad slipped to the depths of this year’s GoDaddy.com offerings or the heavy object-hitting-vital-body-part yuks of the Snickers and Pepsi Max commercials. Still, where there are winners, there have to be losers.Kia Optima – One Epic Ride

The lesser known partner in the Kia/Hyundai duo did a nice job in the graphics animation lab to create a captivating special effects spy story featuring Poseidon, babes on a bad guy’s yacht, aliens, a Mayan ritual, and a nice sporty sedan, the, um, let’s see – oh, right, Kia Optima. You know because it said so in the last two seconds of the video. The Kia Optima (a rebadged Hyundai Sonata (review)) is a good car that needs to raise its visibility.
For storytelling and compelling graphics, One Epic Ride deserves some kind of award; there won’t be one for effectiveness to match last year’s Kia Sorento Super Bowl ad for toys come to life. (Ask the Patriots or Saints how hard it is to repeat.)
Hyundai, in comparison, ran amusing ads-with-a-message that got across crystal clear message: In “Deprogramming,” that the 2011 Hyundai Elantra looks good and gets 40 mpg. In “Anachronistic City,” that the 2011 Hyundai Sonata Hybrid (see review) looks good and was worth the wait. Kia’s One Epic Ride may make sense as part of a bigger marketing program that drives people online to see the ad there, play games, and interact. In other words, the Super Bowl ad was a $3 million referral fee.Chevrolet Cruze – Misunderstanding

To make the 42 mpg Chevrolet Cruze seem more a part of the youth culture, this ad pokes fun of old folks in a rest home who mis-hear and misunderstand the words for a Chevy Cruze ad playing on the rec room TV with the voiceover “42 miles per gallon.” “Huh? 42 wild Italians,” says one geezer. “It’s a cruise for plus-size individuals,” suggests another woman. It’s a no-no to make fun of African-Americans, Hispanics, people in wheelchairs, and kids on short yellow buses. Madison Avenue got the message on that long ago. But to stereotype old farts? Hey, nothing wrong with that. One other mistake with this ad: Unless the volume was turned up loud where you were watching Super Bowl Sunday or nobody was talking loud, you missed the subtleties, so to speak, of this ad.Mini Countryman – Cram It in the Boot

To showcase the luggage capacity of its Mini Countryman, Mini created a game show parody called Cram It in the Boot, to see how much cargo the contestant could stick in the luggage space (boot). Given all the other sophomoric ads of Super Bowl 45 and the buxom showgirl cheering on the contestant here, you’d be forgiven for thinking Cram It in the Boot was some kind of Benny Hill-lives British innuendo. For a brand that sells a lot to women, this was not Mini’s best foot forward.
Mini changed the world of advertising and marketing a decade ago with its low-cost, high-effectiveness alternative marketing at the resurrected Mini’s launch. They’re still mastering their adverts on the telly.